I love making incremental improvements to my website. All the changes I make to this website build up to what you see. This has me thinking that websites are both a place to reflect on, discuss, and make change, as well as being something that can, and does, change over and with time. My website grows with me.

While exploring my website, I noticed in the past that the bold typeface in the headings and in my website name looked a bit different in Safari to Firefox. This week, I learned why: I didn’t supply a bold typeface for my website. This meant that both browsers were trying to create a bold effect rather than relying on the typeface itself to supply bold characters. This has now been fixed. My site, which uses the Standard web font, now loads the bold version of the web font too.

Today I also set out to fix how links appear in italics in my blog posts. Links are styled in blue with an underline, but the colour rules for the em tag were overriding the colour of links within the em tag. This meant that links in em tags preserved their underline, but had the same colour as the surrounding text. This, too, is now fixed. It felt good to finally make this change. Small changes collectively make a big difference.

I also have a new “Make a Website” page. I wrote this page to be a short introduction to how to make a website, referring to the excellent resources others have made on the topic, as well as communities of people building websites. I now link to this page both on my home page and my website sidebar. If you have been looking for a sign to start a website, this is it. The web is wonderful.

On a side note, I learned that Ghost, which I use for publishing blog posts – my static site generator reads posts from Ghost, stored as text files – does not allow emojis in permalinks. I learned this while trying to set the permalink for 🌸 to be the eponymous emoji. This is probably for the best: emojis in permalinks do not, on reflection, necessarily fit into how I think about URL design:

In a sense, URLs are user experience. I use them to navigate through websites. As a site creator, clearly defining URLs helps me know what is where. This is important to me. I want the experience of searching for a page – either for reference, or as I develop my site – to be as intuitive as possible.

Finally, I created a new “for you” page. It reads:

This entire website is for both me and you.

Thank you for visiting!

I much prefer my for you page to any one I have seen so far.

Related is what Sir. Tim Berners-Lee says of the web: “This is for everyone”.

Note: My site styles may be cached for you, so to see any changes to the typeface you may need to do a hard refresh of a page. One day I will figure out how to clear the styles that power my offline mode from readers' caches when I update the styles. That, however, is a task for another day.